These days the amount of software out there for guitarists is pretty mind boggling.

The variety in sound and the varying cost can make it pretty difficult to decide what is right for you and your setup.

There are decisions to make when it comes to choosing what you want.

It cand come down to space, cost and reliability.

The free effects available here are all well and good and most of them are really good.

But they don’t have the power or support that the big boys have – and I’m sorry to say they just can’t compete.

If you’re a novice do you really want to or have the patience to mess around with your pc or would you rather spend money and have an instant, plug and play system?

In these articles I’m going to run through some of the commercial software available, the relative interfaces or alternative interfaces and the idea of using hardware instead.

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Native Instruments – Guitar Rig

Guitar Rig is probably the most well known, and it is expensive but is it? Native Instruments have developed this great software to be practically faultless – lets’ be fair with stuff like this you get what you pay for.

And Guitar Rig is cool – really cool.

And now they’ve taken into account the budget market with their Guitar Rig Mobile.

The nice thing about Guitar Rig is that it has always tried to keep it;s roots with the guitarist by having foot switch controllers. And it works great.

I’ll be honest I’ve only tried the foot rack once before and yeah its good it works, much like most midi based foot pedal switch controllers.

Not really the best judge – I have a rack unit that I use all the time – foot switches tend to break because I’m heavy footed – and if your the same maybe you should give it a miss and stick to the software.

That said it was a while ago that I tried that out – best to get down to your local store and try one out.

As with anything like this you’ve got to investigate what your looking at, make sure it will work on your system.

Read reviews, forums and other articles.

You’re always going to get conflicting views on this kind of thing so it’s best to way up the pros and cons.

And be sensible – do you really need it – do you need both the controller and the software?

Are you looking at just the interface? If so can you cope with just the light version of the software?

Answer these questions before you part with your cash.

Below are some examples of Guitar Rig Products available in the USA and UK